Nicolas Poussin Research Articles

Poussin's Esther before Ahasuerus: Beauty, Majesty, Bondage

The painting Esther before Ahasuerus marks a definitive resolution in Nicolas Poussin's approach to narrative. Instead of focusing on the representation of the passions, Poussin epitomizes Esther's beauty, Ahasuerus's majesty, and the bondage of Israel. He constructs these ideas as pictorial concetti through metaphorical allusions to ancient artworks that also appear in a contemporary text on Esther by Luigi Manzini. These same works inspired Poussin's theoretical precepts on the concetto and ideal imitation. Esther resolves Poussin's experiments with pictorial structure in his later narrative paintings to transmit poetic conceits directly to the beholder.

Death in French Arcady: Nicolas Poussin's The Arcadian Shepherds and Burial Reform in France c. 1800

This essay explores how Nicolas Poussin's The Arcadian Shepherds (c. 1638�40) informed the discourse on burials and mourning that took place at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries in France, following the collapse of traditional religious rituals during the French Revolution. Specifically, this essay examines how The Arcadian Shepherdsserved as a model for a secular system of burials in which an imaginary Arcadia was conflated with the natural landscape of the French countryside and the garden cemetery.

Poussin, Titian and tradition: The Birth of Bacchus and the genealogy of images

The Birth of Bacchus, now in the Fogg Museum at Harvard, is one of Nicolas Poussin's strangest paintings (figure 1).1 It was excecuted in 1657 for Jacques Stella, a follower of the artist, who was then living in Paris. Giovanni Pietro Bellori — Poussin's close friend, and a major theorist of seventeenth-century classicism — gives the following description in his biography of the painter:

The Greek Manner and a Christian Canon: François Duquesnoy's Saint Susanna

Passeri's report in his seventeenth-century biography of Duquesnoy that the sculptor and his friend Nicolas Poussin sought to create art in the Greek manner has long intrigued scholars. This article calls attention to period testimony that corroborates Passeri's account and records an academy formed by Duquesnoy's circle. The significance of the Greek manner is explored in relation to Duquesnoy's Saint Susanna and its seventeenth-century critical reception, and the circumstances of the commission are clarified. The statue's subsequent reception is then related to the issues of taste and the perception of the antique that underlay the sculpture's genesis.

Carolyn Allmendinger. Review of "Nicolas Poussin Paints the Seven Sacraments Twice" by Tony Green.

Carolyn Allmendinger. Review of "Nicolas Poussin Paints the Seven Sacraments Twice" by Tony Green.

Et in Arcadia Ego?: Thomas Amory, Mary Hamilton, and the (Re) Construction of Arcadia

Et in Arcadia Ego?: Thomas Amory, Mary Hamilton, and the (Re) Construction of Arcadia J. DAVID MACEY, JR. In the opening scene of Thomas Amory's idiosyncratic first novel, Memoirs: Containing the Lives of Several Ladies of Great Britain (1755), the anonymous narrator employs the esthetic vocabulary of the eighteenth-century landscape arts, including pastoral poetry, painting and landscape design, in order to describe the novel's heroine, Miss Marinda Bruce, and her rural estate, Hali-farm.1 The narrator assimilates Miss Bruce and her green retreat in his verbal portrait by representing the lovely heroine as a figure in—and for—the no less lovely landscape. In doing so, he repeats a characteristic gesture of eighteenth-century artists, whether novelists, poets, painters or landscape architects, by treating both women and the supposedly female "body" of nature as passive objects of esthetic pleasure and by evaluating them in terms of their ability "to titillate the imagination and satisfy the senses while at the same time remaining within carefully prescribed moral, aesthetic, and territorial limits."2 Amory (71691-1788) uses this scene to explore the power of culturally conditioned esthetic sensibilities to shape—and distort—our understanding of the relationship between human beings and their environment. The narrator's verbal portrait of Miss Bruce is, in fact, misleading; she is not the passive and inarticulate esthetic object that he imagines her to be but rather a landscape artist in her own right who is engaged in revising a well191 192 / MACEY known pastoral scene, Nicolas Poussin's Arcadian Shepherds II (c. 163840 ). Miss Bruce transforms Poussin's painting by depicting a Utopian community in which women, no longer ornamental figures in a landscape constructed by a male artist, act as teachers and spiritual guides to their male companions (22-25). Wer Arcadia corrects the narrator's verbal portrait of Hali-farm by demonstrating the full range of roles available to women as artists and as subjects of the landscape genre. Her revision of Poussin's painting, which requires her to work both within and against the conventions of an established genre, typifies the approach of eighteenth-century women writers to a literary tradition which provided them with a limited thematic and stylistic vocabulary in which to express their hopes, anxieties and lived experiences. Amory's fictional account of Miss Bruce and her painting offers a useful paradigm for interpreting the work of such writers as Eliza Fowler Haywood (71693-1756), Sarah Robinson Scott (1720-95) and Lady Mary (Walker) Hamilton (1739-1816) because it provides a richly symbolic (and exceptionally lucid) example of the way in which marginalized artists learn to speak in their own voices by entering into dialog with traditions that both shape and constrain their artistic development. Amory's Memoirs, now largely forgotten by critics and readers, may seem an unlikely point of departure for a discussion of intertextuality, artistic appropriation, and the social function of the landscape arts during the eighteenth century. Influenced by the oral narratives of Amory's native Ireland as well as by picaresque fiction and contemporary travel narratives, the digressive and episodic Memoirs resists generic classification.3 While Amory's Memoirs and his second, no less digressive novel, 77?e Life and Opinions of John Bunde, Esq. (1756-66) tend to puzzle (if not frustrate) twentieth-century readers, they delighted some of the most sophisticated readers of an earlier age, and these readers' assessments of Amory's work ought not to be taken lightly. Hazlitt, for example, enthusiastically proclaims Amory "the English Rabelais," while Charles Lamb finds in Amory's writing "an infinite fund of pleasantry."4 One recent critic has even suggested that Amory's diffuse and digressive narrative style, with its "blend of landscape description, tourism, and philosophical debate," may have served as one of Wordsworth's models for the design of The Excursion (1814).5 This diffuse and digressive style makes the Memoirs an ideal site at which to begin examining the role that artists played in shaping—and challenging— the social, political and sexual status quo in eighteenth-century England. Trained as a physician, Amory was also an amateur philosopher, theologian and antiquarian, a connoisseur of painting and an...

Une appropriation de l’image de Poussin sous le Consulat et l’Empire : Pierre-Marie Gault de Saint-Germain (1756-1842)

The biased image of Poussin rendered by Pierre-Marie Gault de Saint-Germain (1756-1842) Under the Consulate and the Empire, special attention was focused on Nicolas Poussin. At the head of the French School and a model of classicism, he was at the source of numerous studies and publications, which reached a climax with the tendentious edition of the painter’s letters by Quatremère de Quincy in 1824. A little known episode of this reception concerns an outstanding scholar of the time, artist, connoisseur and theorist Pierre-Marie Gault de Saint-Germain. The article describes the strategy used by Gault and his contemporaries to reshape the image of the great painter and turn him into the model for the modern French School.

Tolkningen iscensätter konstverket - Exempel: Nicolas Poussins Manna, 1637/38-39

The aim of this article is to demonstrate and analyze the impact of an interpretation on the appearance of an artwork. The chosen example is the painting Israelites gathering Manna in the wilderness(1637-9) by Nicolas Poussin. The painting is first viewed and experienced as it appears in the light of French classicist thought, in particular the comprehension of Charles LeBrun and André Félibien. The legacy of French classicism is then traced in later scholarship, and the painting is further seen in relation to other scholarly frameworks. It is finally claimed that the "versions" of the painting as it appears through various interpretations can be explained in terms of a performative dimension in art. It is also claimed that this dimension is an essential aspect of the aesthetic nature of the artwork.

Main Reviews

Books reviewed in this section are:Tony Green, Nicolas Poussin Paints the Seven Sacraments TwiceAndy Goldsworthy, Wall at Storm KingAndy Goldsworthy, TimePietro C Marani, Leonardo da Vinci: The Complete DrawingsPaul Edwards, (ed) Blast: Vorticism 1914–18Deborah Howard, Venice and the East. The Impact of the Islamic World on Venetian Architecture, 1100–1500John Golding, Paths to the Absolute: Mondrian, Malevich, Kandinsky, Pollock, Newman, Rothko and StillEugene R Gaddis, Magician of the Modern: Chick Austin and the Transformation of the Arts in AmericaDavid Tovey, George Fagan Bradshaw and the St Ives Society of ArtistsNicholas Ardizzone, Edward Ardizzone's World: The Etchings and LithographsEvgeny Steiner, Stories for Little Comrades: Revolutionary Artists and the Making of Early Soviet Children's BooksA. d'Souza, (ed) Self and History: A Tribute to Linda NochlinS. Sidlauskas, Body, Place, and Self in Nineteenth‐Century PaintingLuke Herrmann, Nineteenth‐Centiry PaintingMalcolm Goldstein, Landscape with Figures: A History of Art Dealing in the United StatesFrancis M. Naumann and Hector Obalk, (eds) The Selected Correspondence of Marcel DuchampR. Crumb, Waiting for Food Number Two: More Restsurant Placemat DrawingsPeter Saul, Heads 1986–2000Giovanni Lista, Futurism and PhotographyPeter Kennard, Dispatches from an Unofficial War ArtistKate Bush and Michael Newman, Erwin WurmMalcom Miles, The Uses of Decoration: Essays in the Architectural EverydayAlan Read, (ed) Architecturally Speaking: Practices of Art, Architecture and the EverydayChristine Stevenson, Medicine and Magnificence — British Hospital and Asylum ArchitectureMichael Kaplan, Frank Gehry: Sheet MetalPierre de la Ruffinière du Prey, Hawksmoor's London Churches — Architecture and TheologyD Fairchild Ruggles, Gardens, Landscape, and Vision in the Palaces of Islamic SpainAlan Bartram Making Books: Design in British Publishing Since 1945Paul Moorhouse, John Virtue: New York 1998–2000

Art and Architecture in France 1500-1700

Part 1 From the invasion of Italy to the Battle of Pavia 1494-1525: historical background architecture - the introduction of Renaissance motives from Northern Italy - the first chateaux of Francis I sculpture - Guido Mazzoni, the Giusti, Michel Colombe painting - Bourdichon, Perreal. Part 2 The middle years of Francis I 1525-1540: historical background architecture - the chateaux built for Francis I in the Ile-de-France - Madrid, Fontainebleau etc decorative sculpture and painting - Rosso and the early work of Primaticcio portrait painting - Jean Clouet. Part 3 The classical period of the 16th century 1540-1565: historical background architecture - Serlio, Lescot, Philibert de l'Orme, Primaticcio painting and engraving - Primaticcio, Nicolo dell'Abate, Francois Clouet, Jean Duvet sculpture - Goujon, Bontemps, Domenico del Barbiere. Part 4 The wars of religion 1560-1598: historical background architecture - Bullant, Jacques Androuet du Cerceau the elder sculpture - Germain Pilon painting - Antoine Caron, Jean Cousin the younger, and the portrait painters. Part 5 Henry IV and the regency of Marie de'Medici 1598-1630: historical background architecture - the king's works, Le Muet, Salomon de Brosse painting and sculpture - the second school of Fontainebleau, the mannerists of Nancy - Bellange and Callot, late mannerism in Paris, Vignon, Biard. Part 6 Richelieu and Mazarin, 1630-1661: historical background architecture - Lemercier, Francois Mansart, the early work of Le Vau painting - Simon Vouet, the minor painters of the 1630s and the 1640s, Philippe de Champaigne and Flemish influence, the Caravaggesques, the Le Nains, Nicolas Poussin, landscape painting - Claude Lorraine and Gaspar Dughet, the minor classical painters - Le Sueur and Bourdon sculpture - Sarrazin, Francois and Michel Anguier. Part 7 Louis XIV and Colbert 1660-1685: historical background architecture and the decorative arts - the Louvre and Versailles, Bernini, Le Vau, Perrault, J.H. Mansart, Le Notre, Blondel and the academy, L.Bruant, the decorators painting and theory - Lebrun and the academy - Mignard sculpture - Girardon and Coysevox. Part 8 The decline of Louis XIV 1685-1705: historical background architecture - the later work of J.H. Mansart - bullet sculpture - Puget - the later work of Coysevox painting - La Fosse, Jouvenet, Antoine Coypel, the portrait painters - Francois de Troy, Largillierre and Rigaud, Desportes postscript - the transition to the 18th century.

"A Dance to the Music of Time" by Nicolas Poussin

"A Dance to the Music of Time" by Nicolas Poussin

Malcolm Campbell. Review of "Nicolas Poussin: Friendship and the Love of Painting" by Elizabeth Cropper and Charles Dempsey.

Malcolm Campbell. Review of "Nicolas Poussin: Friendship and the Love of Painting" by Elizabeth Cropper and Charles Dempsey.

Nicolas Poussin: the master of colours: Russian museums collections, paintings and drawings

Nicolas Poussin: the master of colours: Russian museums collections, paintings and drawings

Corot in Italy: Open-Air Painting and the Classical-Landscape Tradition

Galassi, P. (1991). Corot in Italy: Open-Air Painting and the ClassicalLandscape Tradition. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. 258 pages. ISBN 0-300-04957-9 (Cloth), 0-300-06710-0 (Paper). Reviewed by Greg M. Thomas Purdue University This book is about much more than Camille Corot's work in Italy. In demonstrating his central thesis-that Corot's great innovations in landscape painting grew out of the conventions of his academic art education-Peter Galassi writes two other histories. First, his book is a sweeping survey of an entire tradition of landscape painting in oils around 1800, a tradition that laid the groundwork for many subsequent innovations of Modernism. Second, and of particular relevance for art educators, it is by far the most in-depth study to date of how men trained to become artists in the early 19th century. In re-creating the early history of outdoor oil painting, Galassi first explains, in chapter 1, the centrality of outdoor nature drawings in the theory and practice of the classical landscape tradition-the tradition established by the French painters Nicolas Poussin and Claude Lorrain working in Italy in the 17th century. Galassi then describes how, in the 1780s, Neoclassical painters from northern Europe made the outdoor oil study an essential component of academic training, particularly in Italy. The aim of such studies was established by Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes, the most influential teacher and theorist of Neoclassical landscape. In his treatise of 1800, Valenciennes explained in great detail how to capture the fleeting effects of light and atmosphere through rapid outdoor oil sketches of the kind for which his own superbly subtle and spontaneous studies could serve as examples. But Valenciennes saw such empirical analysis only as a tool for the elaboration of synthetic, artificial compositions that could carry noble classical meanings. Based on this theoretical interdependence of study and invention, Galassi argues in chapter 2 against the received idea of an opposition between progressive naturalism and conservative classicism in French art. He shows that around 1800, virtually all French landscapists imitated either 17th-century Franco-Italian models or 17th-century Dutch models, and he characterizes naturalistic outdoor painting as an inherent part of trying to revive these classical traditions. This Neoclassical impulse was further reinforced by a pervasive tourist culture in Italy, which is reconstructed in chapter 3. Empirical study became mixed up with view-making, and Galassi goes to great lengths to demonstrate that artists followed set itineraries and depicted canonical sites in an effort to realize the tourist desire to imbue every aspect of the Italian countryside with ancient associations. While thus reconstituting the artistic goals underlying early outdoor painting, the book also builds up a rich appreciation of how men learned to make art. Oil studies were part of student training, and the Neoclassical context of chapter one clarifies how students were inculcated with Neoclassical values and vision. Chapter 2 becomes more specific, rigorously documenting the surprising extent to which students alternated between copying prints of standardized views and copying actual sites. And chapter 3, focusing on Italy's tourist culture, emphasizes that the coherence and mutual reinforcement of the artist community in Rome was essential in advancing landscape skills. These first three chapters serve, as Galassi asserts at the outset, as a background to the fourth and final chapter. Here he draws on the contexts of the outdoor painting tradition and Neoclassical training to illuminate the book's ostensible main subject-Corot's oil studies from his first visit to Italy in 1825-28. …

French and British paintings from 1600 to 1800 in the Art Institute of Chicago: a catalogue of the collection

The second in a series of scholarly catalogs on the permanent collections of The Art Institute of Chicago, this volume focuses on the museum's important holdings of French and British paintings of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The catalog contains comprehensive entries on close to one hundred paintings, representing the full range of artistic production (portraiture, landscape, still life, genre, and history painting) in France and Britain during this period. Featured are major works by some of the most significant artists of the time: Jacques Louis David, Jean Honore Fragonard, Claude Lorrain, Nicolas Poussin, and Jean Antoine Watteau among the French; Henry Fuseli, Thomas Gainsborough, Sir Joshua Reynolds, and Benjamin West among the British. Each painting in the catalog is accompanied by complete and up-to-date documentation, including a detailed description of physical condition, a fully documented provenance, and a critical discussion of attribution, date, subject, and function, as well as a summary of earlier scholarship. Many of these works are little published and some are published here for the first time. Forty-one works are reproduced in color, the rest in duotone; there are also 101 comparative illustrations.

Et in Arcadia Video: Poussin' the Image of Culture With Marin and Kuntzel

Et in Arcadia Video: Poussin’ the Image of Culture with Marin and Kuntzel Timothy Murray (bio) When considering an object by itself and on its own terms, without considering what it might represent, one has an idea of a thing, like the idea of the earth and of the sun. But when reflecting on a certain object only as it represents an other, one has an idea of a sign, and this initial object is called a sign. This, then, is how one ordinarily considers maps and paintings. The sign thus includes two concepts: one, the thing representing; the other, the thing represented; and the nature of the sign consists of prompting the latter by the former. —Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole, La Logique ou l’art de penser Those readers familiar with Louis Marin’s extensive writings on the semiology of art will recognize my title’s pun on one of his favorite images, Nicolas Poussin’s pastoral elegy, Et in Arcadia Ego, a painting which Marin analyzes in detail in To Destroy Painting and throughout his extensive oeuvre. Marin is partial to this painting of the signs of death because its tombstone materializes the powerful role of the sign by representing the two things, death and utopia, that are never perceptible as anything other than representations. Arcadia and death can be known only through the signs of their ephemerality, through representations of infinity and finality, whether of the [End Page 431] ultimate future or the idealized past. Put in other terms, Poussin’s memorable painting performs the twofold function of the sign as theorized by Arnauld and Nicole in the 1683 edition of La logique ou l’art de penser: Et in Arcadia Ego embodies in one picture plane the thing represented and the thing representing. Poussin’s painting of the display of the tomb and its inscription, “Et in Arcadia Ego,” thus functions as the doubled representation of representation, the deictic showing of the thing that can only be represented virtually as representation. Just where might we locate such poststructural concerns with representation, semiology, and virtuality within the context of the contemporary study of culture, not to mention within the discourse of what has come to be known as the discipline of “cultural studies?” Do such reflections on death and utopia preclude their conceptual usefulness to cultural studies which tends to be more at home, more comfortable, with the critical markers of realism, materialism, facticity, and “history?” Judging from the extensive bibliography of Cultural Studies, the 788 page Routledge reader edited by Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler, the answer would seem to be simple. This bibliography includes not a single reference to such a figure as influential as Marin, whose interrelated writings on semiotics, psychoanalysis, and Continental philosophy helped to forge the discourse of poststructural approaches to the cultural. Also symptomatic is the volume’s lack of bibliographic reference to other influential French theoreticians of text and image, such as Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Jean-Luc Nancy, Herbert Damisch, Hélène Cixous, Raymond Bellour, Cathérine Clément, Christian Metz, Guy Rosolato, Thierry Kuntzel, and J.-B. Pontalis, whose work dialogues insistently with earlier traditions of German philosophy, psychoanalysis, and cultural theory to map an ideological approach to culture and its vicissitudes. Indeed, the same absence is true of significant contemporary figures in Germany such as Alexander Kluge and Oscar Negt who insist that the role of fantasy be included in any discussion or production of the media. It is notable that this volume’s encyclopedic attempt to delineate a critical terrain of the cultural remains strikingly indifferent to, if not in defensive disavowal of, the extensive Continental discourse on representation and its cultural work. Many adherents of cultural studies no doubt would attribute this absence or entombment of the discourse on representation to what they perceive as the muted response of semio-psycho-philosophical analyses to the imperatives of identity politics and the attendant realistic, materialist [End Page 432] issues of race, class, sexuality, ethnicity, and colonialism. While such an Anglo-American spin on the poststructural (in)sensitivity to cultural identity helps to foreground many political issues which are crucial to any theorization of...

Soldiers and Enigmatic Girls: The Politics of Dutch Domestic Realism, 1650-1672

AMONG THE ENTERTAINMENTS THEY DEVISE to pass the dull winter days, the aristocratic protagonists of Goethe's Elective Affinities (1809) stage some famous paintings. First on the program are history paintings by Anthony van Dyck and Nicolas Poussin. But for their third tableau vivant, Goethe's characters switch from history to genre, from van Dyck and Poussin to Gerard ter Borch's PaternalAdmonition (fig. 1). Here is how Goethe describes this third tableau:

BOOK REVIEWS

Journal Article BOOK REVIEWS Get access Nicolas Poussin. Friendship and the Love of Painting. By ELIZABETH CROPPER and CHARLES DEMPSEY. Princeton U P. 1996. pp. xix + 374, 12 colour + 165 black & white illus £69.50 A. W PRICE A. W PRICE Birkbeck College Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The British Journal of Aesthetics, Volume 37, Issue 2, April 1997, Pages 177–179, https://doi.org/10.1093/bjaesthetics/37.2.177 Published: 01 April 1997

The Enigma of St Joseph in Poussin'sHoly Family on the Steps

The writer discusses the symbolism of the figure of St. Joseph in Nicolas Poussin's painting The Holy Family on the Steps. In this work, Christ and his Mother are seated beside St. Joseph, who is painted in shadow and is absorbed in measuring with a pair of compasses on a tablet. In this representation of St. Joseph, Poussin is exalting the saint as the earthly artisan who is surrogate of God the Father, the heavenly Artisan, an image that is rooted in a long and venerable iconographical and theological tradition. Complementing this concept of Joseph as the earthly artisan, Poussin casts the saint in shadow, thus alluding to the hiddenness of his dignity as the representative of God the Father on earth, as well as to his roles as the shadow of the Eternal Father that concealed the God-child and as the shadow of the Holy Spirit that protected the Virgin Mary and concealed the Incarnation from Satan.

Poussin and the arts of history

Abstract Modern scholarship bas characterized Nicolas Poussin's history paintings as concerned with exacting archaeological accuracy. Walter Friedlaender and Anthony Blunt, who pioneered the study of Poussin's intellectual context as a means of interpreting his work, understood the artist's interest in history as that of an antiquarian, concerned above all with the accurate depiction of historical detail. Yet it has long been noted that not all Poussin's histories fulfill this claim. In raising the issue of Poussin as a historian, my aim is not so much to dispute past interpretation, but to add a further dimension. By placing Poussin's history paintings within a broader analysis of Counter-Reformation culture, I hope to shed light both on thcir narrative structure and didactic intent. Specifically, I will argue tbat contemporary history writing patronized by thc Church provides an appropriate complex of ideas through which to analyze Poussin's historical work. How to write history, and to what end, was under intense discussion in the seventeenth century. Poussin's history paintings formed part of this debate.1